SecureAPlus 3.5.0

Block all unknown programs from running on your PC

By Mike Williams | 30 May 2016

SecureAPlus is an application whitelisting tool which allows only approved programs to run on your computer. If you plug a USB drive into your system, for instance, and it tries to launch something, then you'll be alerted and the program won't run until you give your permission.

After a straightforward installation, SecureAPlus builds its whitelist of your installed applications. This took some five hours on our test PC as the program crawled all over our hard drive looking for executables, building a whitelist and scanning for threats, but we could at least continue to use the system as the scan was running.

Once the check was complete, SecureAPlus displayed a list of everything it thought could be dangerous. The program uses a cloud-based combination of 12 antivirus engines (Bitdefender, Emsisoft, Avira etc) so unsurprisingly we had a lot of false positives (26, in fact), but it only took a couple of minutes for us to browse the list for any real dangers.

Preparations complete, life became much more straightforward. Our existing applications continued to work just as before, but download and run something new, and unless it's signed by a trusted certificate, you're warned: "The file is not in the whitelist. Do you want to trust this file?" Click "Yes" and it runs, "No" and it doesn't, and for the most part it's as simple as that.

Future scans are quicker and easier, too. With the baseline scan complete, further checks typically run in just a few seconds.

Please note, installing this "Freemium" version of SecureAPlus gets you a free licence for one year only. You can extend this by referring friends, otherwise upgrading to the Premium edition gets you email alerts, multiple machine management and email support, and is yours from $22.50/ year.

Verdict

The initial scan is horribly slow and prone to false positives, but once you're set up SecureAPlus proves to be a very smart whitelisting solution which gives you much more control over what's running on your PC.